[Rd] Problem building R with Intel MKL v10 BLAS

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:

> Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>> On Fri, 25 Jan 2008, Michael Braun wrote:
>> 
>>> Thanks for everyone's help.  Unfortunately, still no success.  So I took 
>>> the alternate route suggested in section A.3.1.5 of R-admin, and just 
>>> created a symbolic link from libRblas.so to .../libmkl_gf_lp64.so.  I can 
>>> still multiply 2 matrices together in R, so it looks like this is working. 
>>> Can you propose any other test to be sure?
>> 
>> Run 'make check' ... it includes some tests specifically for working BLAS.
> <snipped>
>
> That reminds me of a discussion I had with our IT guy regarding building R 
> 2.5.0 against MKL 8. He had MKL 8.0 against 2.4.x previously and it is
> actually faster than 9.x ; but he was having trouble upgrading to R
> 2.5.0 (with MKL 8).
>
> It turns out that R 2.5.0 added a couple of checks for some
> double-complex BLAS/LAPACK routines (I can't remember which), which are 
> missing in MKL8, so it is a fact that R 2.5.0 won't build against MKL 8 - but 
> will build against MKL 9, and once you have built 2.5.0 against MKL9, you can 
> swap the libraries (somewhat dangerously) to get the speed
> of MKL8 back...
>
> It is not unthinkable that some more checks are added in 2.6.x and
> MKL 10 is not passing them... one needs the result of config.log to be sure.

Looking at the svn logs, the last change to the BLAS configure tests was 
in Nov 2005.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595